My journalism journey, part 26

As you might have guessed by reading all these, I was never athletic. I was the fat kid who was put behind home plate to stop the runners. I couldn't run or throw. My sister used to throw a rock-hard 16-inch softball at me so hard, it jammed my fingers. She said I wasn't catching it properly (she was right, but it still hurt like hell). To this day, I have crooked fingers. I can trip over my own two feet just walking through the house. I hurt my knee once tripping over Christmas wrapping paper (oh, and I'm also a slob).

So a lot of my adventures covering sports involved getting hurt. While I was in college, I got plowed into on the sidelines by a bunch of rugby players. Served me right, I was standing too close to the sidelines. Still hurt a lot.

In Montana, I was shooting a high school football game and saw the play coming toward me. I started backing up and still couldn't get out of the way enough because the Anaconda players would back up enough. After that, the official told the coaches to get their players behind the lines. Where I was standing was OK but the players had to move back. I wound up with a big deep bruise on my leg.

But the biggest injury I had came covering auto racing. Did I get hit by a car? No. But it still was a funny story.

I had never covered the local auto racing at the Brown County Speedway in Aberdeen, South Dakota. But the guys who usually took care of this task -- Dave Vilhauer and Matt Schmidt -- were otherwise occupied. (I think Matt was on vacation and Dave was covering something Matt would have covered, or vice versa.) So off I went to the speedway on a Friday night.

It was the first night of racing, so my task was to get names and numbers of all the entrants. I got out there early enough to get my bearings, get the drivers' names and car numbers, and get into the crow's nest to cover the race.

The drivers were running practice laps, so I looked over to the track marshal for the OK to cross the track. He waved me across, but I saw a car on the other side so I figured I should hurry. I don't run fast, so I scurried across at my quickest speed (which isn't very fast).

The problem was, I didn't know the inside of the track was wet down. So as I got to my goal, the track infield, I slipped in the mud, going down on my hands and knees.

Everything was covered in mud; my notebook, pen, hands, jeans, shoes, even the tip of my nose. I got up gingerly and scooted slowly into the infield and looked over to the grandstand. I'm sure everyone was laughing at me. I would have been laughing at me.

The people in the infield were nice enough, though. Someone gave me some napkins so I could clean off some of the dirt from my notebook, pen and body. Then I had to get to work, so I had no time to think about how much I hurt.

Days later, the orthopedic surgeon who examined me said I had the "big three" of knee injuries: torn meniscus, torn anterior cruciate ligament and sprained medial collateral ligament. He said, "When football players do this, they cart them off the field on a golf cart and they have reconstructive knee surgery."

I replied, "But I'm a sports writer, nearly 40, so I got up and climbed into the crow's nest, did my job, went back to the office, wrote my story and then found out what was wrong." And then he added, "And we're going to just scope your knee because you can live without an ACL."

As I said, I rose from the mud, got the names and numbers of all the drivers, climbed into the crow's nest, and covered the race (which ran long, with lots of yellow flags). I had to stand most of the time, and my knee was aching. By the time I got done, I had missed deadline (which often happened; if it did, we just held the story for Sunday).

I went back and told the story to my sports editor, Ron Feickert, who had a good chuckle; the adventure would make a good column and I'd get a first-place award for it later.

I went home, took off my jeans and my knee inflated like a balloon. A big bruise showed up in the shape of an arrow pointing down. Don't know if that was prophetic or not, but by Saturday morning I was really sore.

That morning, I had to get up early and drive to Sioux Falls for a South Dakota Press Association awards luncheon. I had won first place and if you got first, you could go to the awards luncheon. So I had to dress up for the drive, and my pantyhose barely got up over my swollen leg. I was in pain for most of the drive.

When I got to Sioux Falls, I told American News Editor Cindy Eikamp what had happened the night before, keeping it humorous, of course, but asking if this was a workers' comp case. She said yes, and told me to see the doctor as soon as I could.

I stayed overnight in Sioux Falls, soaking my leg in the hot tub. An ice bath might have been better. But the hot tub felt good. Just not on the knee.

Eventually, I had surgery on my right knee, arthroscopic surgery. I had done so many stories on athletes having their knees scoped, I thought I knew it all. But I learned a whole lot more by having my knee done.

A few years later, I fell in the tub at my brother Ed and sister-in-law Margaret's house. I had to get the left knee scoped. Another couple years and I fell again, tripping over a couple rolls of Christmas wrapping paper.

Pretty soon, my knees were a real hot mess. But first, I had to lose my weight. I was 355 pounds at my heaviest. More on that later.